


The Craft of Seduction

by RobinWritesChirps



Category: Firebringer - Team StarKid
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Background Grunt/Emberly/Tiblyn, Crafts, Domestic, F/F, Fluff, Marijuana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-22 21:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21083339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobinWritesChirps/pseuds/RobinWritesChirps
Summary: The first gift was soap. A handful of miniature heart-shaped little soaps shoved into Zazzalil's palms in passing between lectures. Zazzy wasn't a fucking hotel guest, but she took the present gratefully nonetheless. The cross stitch frame was a much greater surprise. Home-baked pottery was even more unexpected and by the time Keeri started composing her music, she began to ask herself what the actual fuck was going on.Little Keeralil modern AU feat. very unhelpful Emberly and clueless Zazz.





	The Craft of Seduction

**Author's Note:**

> I just really love this pairing, y'all :) I've started writing more consistently so I expect to post more in the next few weeks, though perhaps not more Keeralil in the near future. But more Starkid in general and Firebringer specifically, too.

The first gift was soap.

She walked out of her engineering class to find Keeri lurking round the corner, who beamed when she spotted Zazzalil among the small crowd of exhausted students exiting the hall and skipped the distance between them merrily.

"I have a present for you!"

"Oh! Thanks!"

Zazzalil smiled as her hand was pulled by Keeri and said present was slid into her palm. Students were still hustling out of the room and she took a few steps to the side to have a closer look undisturbed. Pink and red flashed at her tired eyes that had stared at the white screen of the lecture for too long and she blinked a couple of times before her brain caught up with her sight. A sniff confirmed her thoughts.

"Soaps? Thanks, Keeri, that's… sweet?"

But when she looked up to give Keeri a hug, or at the very least a pat on the shoulder, there was no one standing here in the hall than her asshole classmates. She closed her mouth, frowned. Five little thumb-size soaps in her hand. She smelled them again. Rose and pomegranate. Shrugging, she pocketed them and went on with her day. They could only be better than dollar store unscented soap.

The next gift was a small frame of a cross-stitched landscape.

"What is this?" Zazzalil asked curiously, taking a closer look at the beautiful little work of art. "Is that like a cabin in the woods?"

"Uh huh," Keeri nodded.

They were in a crowded bus and Zazzalil was desperately trying not to fall. One-handedly bringing the little frame to her eyes for closer inspection made her much less steady, but Keeri held her arm firmly to keep her in place, all the fixture she needed.

"It's near a lake," she said as if that was any explanation. "In fall."

Zazzalil looked at her for any clue. Finding nothing, she looked back at the cross-stitch. It had a few little mistakes here and there, but was overall much more than she herself could have ever expected to produce. The missed stitches gave it a certain charm, even. She smiled.

"It's really cute," she said. "Thanks, I love it."

The soaps were dwindling down to soaplets after being used daily since Keeri had given them to her, but the frame gained a spot on Zazzalil's nightstand. It wasn't going anywher. She stared at it for a long time that night. Once was oddity, twice was coincidence. Maybe Keeri was getting into a habit of creativity and had too many projects to keep them all at her own place. She lived in a small studio under the roofs in a cheap run-down building downtown. It was packed with all sorts of trinkets already. If she was indeed an apprentice soap-maker or needlework adept, then the studio would most likely be even more cluttered than it already was. Zazzalil could easily understand why she would want to get rid of any extras and two of her declutter attempts had just happened to be delivered to herself. She looked at the little yarn cabin one last time and went to sleep.

Thrice, however, was a pattern.

"Plates? You've made me plates?!"

Keeri gave her that goofy smile of hers.

"Well, they were going to be bowls but I kinda lost control of the potter's wheel and they flattened out. I thought, why not make a set?"

Zazzalil inspected the purple enameled pottery pieces. Lovely, irregular and on the thicker side as they were, absolutely lovely. Keeri seemed to have added some sort of glitter to them, or at least something that sparkled. Zazzalil could have envisioned them being sold at a month's rent's price in some hipster artisan shop.

"This is just two of 'em," she pointed out. "Shit, sorry, that sounded ungrateful, right? I love them, they're gorgeous!"

"Two can be a complete set," Keeri replied, not even picking up on Zazz rudely looking at her gift plates in the mouth. "If it's just a set of two."

Carefully, Zazzalil put the plates deep inside her cupboard so that they would never fall by mishap. There. The most precious item of her kitchen by far.

"You didn't even tell me you'd taken up pottery," she said. "What about cross-stitching? And soaps?"

Keeri gave a nonchalant shrug and changed the subject.

The mystery was afoot and the clues kept piling on one by one. Soaps. Cross-stitch frame. Two homemade clay plates. Before she knew it, Zazzalil was drowning in a huge handmade quilt (big enough for two, Keeri had specified, or for one person who loves sleeping in a large bed on her own). Then came the drawings, a new one every time they saw each other, enough to cover a wall if the wall was rather small, several scenes of cozy home interiors which Keeri stated were probably from the cabin she had cross-stitched. By the time she gave her yet another drawing, this time with two people snuggling on an old couch by the fireplace, Zazzalil could take it no more.

As it happened, her go-to person for advice was typically Keeri. That was partly because they spent a shit load of time together and she was usually the closest person available, partly because Keeri never really said a word against Zazzalil's ideas and she liked the validation. Even more because that meant she had the excuse of a yes voice affirming her choices if consequences came around. In this matter, however, Keeri was the reason Zazz needed advice in the first place, so she had to turn to the next best person for the job.

"I don't know shit about romance," Emberly said at once before Zazzalil was even done explaining the situation. "Did you want this or not?"

Zazz handed her a twenty and hurriedly grabbed the little plastic bag of weed that was given in return. Having hidden it deep down at the bottom of her backpack, she looked up at Emberly again and frowned.

"What do you mean, you don't know shit about romance? You have a girlfriend  _ and _ a boyfriend!"

Emberly shrugged. She was rolling a joint, carefully licking the paper with pinkie fingers pointing to the ceiling.

"I said I don't know shit about romance. That's exactly what I meant."

"But you think this is a romantic situation?"

Tiblyn, who had been browsing her phone with ever fading attention the longer Zazzalil spoke, perked into the conversation.

"I think it's really cute," she said, "For her to take all that time for you."

Emberly seemed to assume that her own participation in this debate had come to an end. Standing to her feet, she handed Zazzalil the blunt after having barely taken two hits of it and walked off to the corner of their little apartment that was her experimental kitchen station. It had smelled of something burning before Zazzalil had started telling her case situation, though nothing was on the stove at all. Eagerly, Zazzalil brought the joint to her mouth but her brain didn't seem to make the right connections even after the calming embrace of smoking pot washed over her.

"Well, Keeri  _ is _ sweet," she said slowly and tapped ash down into the well-used ashtray tucked between the rest of the junk littering the coffee table.

"Yeah," Tiblyn sighed, heart-eyed. "It's so special when someone makes something just for you and makes you feel all unique and…"

Emberly, who had been going back to whatever concoction it was that smelled so foul, chimed in suddenly.

"I mean, she definitely wants to bone you."

Zazzalil coughed on smoke and it took Tiblyn patting her back quite heavily for her to recuperate.

"What?!"

Emberly touched her shoulder gently from the back.

"Here," she said and took back the joint, replacing it with a tall glass filled with a thick green smoothie. "Tell me what you think."

Zazzalil was never one to refuse a present or a challenge and she took a large gulp of the mixture. She'd hardly had a taste that she thought she would have to spit it back into the glass but with effort and focus, she swallowed it.

"What the fuck, Emberly," she whined, "I came here for advice, not poisoning!"

"Too bitter?" Emberly frowned. "Well, you'll thank me later. Your colon is gonna be cuh- _ lean _ ."

She handed the glass to Tiblyn, who took a courtesy sip out of it as well, before chugging the whole mixture herself and slamming the glass on the table.

"Look," she told Zazzalil firmly. "Get your head out of your ass a little bit. Can't you see the pattern here?"

Zazzalil sighed in exasperation.

"You're no help at all, what do you mean, the pattern?"

Emberly snatched Zazzalil's phone from her and browsed the same gallery Zazzalil had shown her just earlier. With every scroll, she commented.

"Heart-shaped soaps," she enumerated, "A small little cottage, twice. A quilt for a two person bed. Dishes for two people. Zazz, either she wants you to invest in a rental vacation home with her, or she's trying to bone you."

Tiblyn nodded wistfully. Zazzalil blinked, looking at the pictures she had taken herself of all new artefacts her house was now getting filled with. She stared for a long while before turning back to Emberly.

"But what do I need to do?"

"Figure it out."

Zazzalil slept on it. Once, twice, thrice, she slept on it all within the same day, but no naps brought her any closer to the solution. She rubbed her eyes and saw a notification had popped up while she'd been dozing off. Keeri was sending her a private playlist of some newly composed songs. She thanked her, of course, and listened to the playlist as she studied but very soon, it became apparent that many of the songs had lewd innuendos in every other damn verse and Zazzalil suddenly felt very hot. She put down her headphones and groaned into her textbook.

They hung out a lot. Emberly was a friend beyond simply being her weed gal, Tiblyn went way back, but Keeri was by far the person Zazzalil spent the most time with. There was something about her, an easy going nature that never seemed to be disturbed by anything at all. She lived in a plane of existence that was entirely her own and maybe, if you were close enough, you'd catch glimpses of it. Zazzalil sometimes felt like it was in full view for her, but that was seldom enough. Mostly, she felt like Keeri was an enigma that never would be resolved.

"I've finished the soaps you gave me," Zazzalil said tentatively the next time Keeri came over.

They were smoking weed and shoving their faces with as many chips as human orifices could possibly contain. The visit had started out with random YouTube browsing, yes, but that had devolved into commenting more than watching and eventually the pretence had been dropped entirely and they had just ended up laughing themselves silly with a cloudy smoky mind. Their jokes had turned simpler and more ridiculous by the second before tiredness slowly took over and for the past five minutes, they had just been smiling stupidly at the wall, content with just being, existing near each other.

"Yeah?"

Keeri turned herself to the side to look at her. Large blue eyes squinting with the sluggishness of too much weed in too short a time, a sharp nose that fascinated Zazzalil − she found herself wanting to trace its shape and bunched her fingers into a fist to stop herself −, messy buns that always threatened to fall from their ties but never did. She was beautiful, in her way. No, Zazzalil corrected herself. She was beautiful, period. Zazzalil had always thought that everything Keeri did seemed to be hardly by design, as if life happened to her and Keeri floated peacefully upon the waves. Yet here she was, showering Zazzy with gifts of her own making, and more and more she could not imagine that it was coincidental or accidental at all.

"Yeah," she smiled. "They smelled real nice, I felt so fancy."

There was a foot of distance between them, not enough that the gap would be impossible to bridge if she leaned over. Enough to be called a gap nonetheless. Tentatively, like two friends hanging out, her hand slid from her lap to the space on the couch between the two of them. Keeri's hand so close she could almost feel it, yet so far. Closer yet, their fingers brushed and Keeri's smile was ecstatic. Zazzalil gulped. A small cottage by the lake, she remembered. A bed for two. A song about sex hair. She pulled her hand back, only enough to break contact but the gap grew to canyon. She took another hit of weed and let it wash away her shame.

She found herself banging on Emberly's door the next day and didn't stop knocking till, after an outrageous eternity of waiting all of twenty seconds, someone answered. Zazzalil's heart fell in her chest. Emberly hadn't opened the door, or even Tiblyn. It was the third one, the guy whose name Zazzalil never managed to remember. Tall, wearing a pair of Hawaiian shorts and nothing else, his pudgy hairy torso was just about at Zazzalil's eye level. It was dotted with paint stains, as was his manbun, which had her wondering what precisely he was doing with his acrylics, but that was a question for another day.

"Oh, shoot, Zazzalil, right?"

She shoved her hands back into the front pocket of her hoodie.

"Uh huh."

He scratched the back of his ear, which bore a piercing that distorted his lobe and made Zazzalil slightly uncomfortable.

"The girls have just gone out," he said apologetically. "Sorry."

"That's fine, I'll just…"

But the guy − Grunt, Zazz now remembered after much effort − pulled the door wide open and gestured her inside.

"They'll be back in a bit, come on! Make yourself at home."

Zazzalil stepped inside despite every instinct screaming otherwise.

"You want something to drink? Emberly bottled some spinach kombucha the other day, it's to die for."

Die sounds accurate, Zazzalil thought, and shook her head.

"Suit yourself," Grunt shrugged.

His art corner was spilling over into the rest of the living room, coffee table now covered in pots and tubes at various levels of fullness and cleanliness. A big easel for, she supposed, a big guy, but it didn't make the painting on it seem any less like the work of an overachieving kindergartner.

"So how about that Keeri girl, huh?"

"What?! How'd you know about her?!"

Grunt was mixing paints in a small area of his canvas which might have portrayed a big cat or a luscious forest. She couldn't tell and couldn't make herself care, either.

"Any progress?" He went on. "Tiblyn said that you were being seduced and… Oh, fuck."

He stared at the painting, unmoving.

"… You can always paint over it," Zazzalil offered, but Grunt only swirled around and stared quizzically. "That bit you just messed up over there?"

"What? Oh, no, no, the painting's perfect, it's just that I only now remembered that… that she asked me not to tell anyone…"

Zazzalil huffed.

"Well, that's going great, obviously." She crashed into the sofa next to their cat, who turned his head to her at the sudden weight, then yawned and went back to his nap. She scratched his fat head and got a purr in reply. "Fuck it, right? There's no progress at all."

She pulled her phone from her pocket, browsed her gallery to show him.

"She gave me this the other day."

Grunt leaned down, squinting to have a look.

"Oh wow." Without asking, he snatched Zazzalil's phone from her to look closer. "Wow, she's got great technique."

She sighed. Her head sank into the back of the couch once, twice as she clang it there again to try and force some order into her brain.

"It's a fucking coochie, dude."

Grunt's eyes widened with shock and he looked again. For much too long to Zazzalil's taste. She grabbed the phone back and shoved it into her pocket. Letting out an inhumanely frustrated groan, she rubbed her eyes and left her arm there like a fainting damsel of the Renaissance.

"Why the fuck is she giving me that?"

There was silence and she felt the weight of Grunt sitting next to her. She scooted ever so slightly away from him.

"Well," he said tentatively, "Before we started dating, I painted a picture of Emberly for her. So that she would fall in love with me."

Against all odds of logic and good sense, that had, after all, worked on Emberly. Weird as they were, the little trio had to be the most stable relationship Zazzalil knew of.

"And what'd she do?"

"She cooked me a meal."

Zazzalil only had to think for half a second.

"I can't cook," she said. "That won't work. Wait, what did Tibs do?"

Grunt shrugged.

"It was more of a, Tibs is wooed by us situation. She didn't do anything."

"So what does that  _ mean _ ?" Zazzalil insisted. "Do I just sit here pretty and let Keeri woo me without doing anything?"

He held up a finger in pretend wisdom.

"Who says you can't do anything? You have a mouth."

This time, she backed away from him much less subtly, taking a seat as far on her side of the couch as possible in horror.

"I am  _ not _ discussing that with you!"

Grunt's face fell into solid embarrassment when he realized the meaning.

"Oh my god, no, I meant to ask her out! Jeez. What happened to romance, huh?"

She squinted her eyes to study him closely. She had always had her doubts about him. She couldn't say if this conversation confirmed such doubts or set them free.

" _ Sure _ ," she said slowly, hesitantly. "Look, tell the girls I was here, right? I'm gonna go."

He gave her a self conscious smile, but nodded. Zazzalil showed herself the way out on her own. Emberly and Tiblyn, if they got the message at all, didn't contact her that day and so Zazzalil was entirely on her own to face the Keeri storm.

They hung out at Keeri's place the next time. It made no matter, she supposed, but still she would have preferred to be in absolute home territory for this. Still, it had to be done, to be asked. Zazzalil braced herself for much longer than she ever had for meeting any person at all, even any important official crap. She shook her fingers, wriggled them, and knocked before pushing the door open. Keeri never locked it when she was home, she knew.

"I'm cooking!" Keeri announced excitedly as Zazzalil let herself in, dropping her back and coat on the chair by the door, kicking off her sneakers. "I got into cooking."

Her counterspace was narrow at the best of times. Presently, it was fully and entirely covered with jars and boxes of more types of ingredients than Zazzalil had probably ever used in her combined cooking experience so far in life.

"Nice!" Zazzalil replied, trying to sound more chill and confident than she felt. "It smells… It smells. Nice. Great. Hey, can I talk to you about…"

"Oh, hey, I got this for you," Keeri said suddenly and pointed behind her to something wrapped in brown kraft paper. "It's a gift."

Zazzalil closed her mouth. Biting back a sigh, she picked up the gift and tore open the paper. A sweater. An entire damn sweater soft as a waterfall between her hands, some smooth shimmery yarn.

"Did you make it yourself?"

She knew the answer, of course.

"Yeah, I've taken up crochet. I've been working on it for a bit, actually. I wanted to like, finish it? You know?" She hadn't looked at Zazzalil for the whole tirade. In her defense, something was cooking on the stove and seemed to be at a boiling point. Even more to her defense, Zazzalil was a coward and an idiot. "D'you like it?"

"Of course I like it," she replied at once. "Keeri, I…"

But she lost the track of her thoughts and said nothing. She put down the sweater, yet another marvelous gift to add to the list. Her body fell in a lump into the closest chair at the kitchen table and she tapped the table nervously. A wall's worth of drawings of a domestic life. A freaking yonic painting. A sweater now, with a cute hood and included mittens, a sweater Keeri had hurried to finish after the recent fiasco instead of dropping Zazzalil altogether.

"Hey, Keeri?"

"Mmh?"

Keeri was sniffing the content of her pan suspiciously. Discontent with what she found, she added various amounts of several different spices. Zazzalil wondered if there was any thought behind it, or if Keeri was just acting out of the will of her heart. She wondered that a lot.

"Do you…" Keeri plunged a pinkie into the mixture and licked it clean. Zazzalil took a big breath. "Do you wanna go like on a date some time?"

"Oh!" Keeri cried out, only to hurry to the pantry shelf and grab some jar to add a little bit of the paste it contained into her dish. "Tahina. Yeah, sure."

She had her back to Zazzalil, entirely focused on her task. Zazzalil wanted to groan, to yell in frustration.

"You mean that's what you want? For us to date?"

Keeri stirred the pot with an energy and cheerfulness Zazzalil could only hope to ever match. Not turning to look at her, she nodded.

"Yeah, I'd like that."

"Like, if it was up to you?" Zazzalil insisted. "You would? If I asked you?"

"Uh huh."

Zazzalil stared in wonder and amazement. Easy as that.

"Alrighty then." She tapped her fingers to the table nervously one last time before flattening her hands on it decidedly. "Dating it is."

The small room was filling up with the many clashing scents of Keeri's cooking but they seemed to her to be the perfect blend, the exact right mix of each. Grabbing the sweater from the back of the chair she had draped it on, she pulled it over her head. It fit perfectly, snugly. Keeri started to hum gently to the tune of one of her naughty songs. Zazzalil hugged herself and told herself this was the warmest sweater she had ever worn.


End file.
